Pamela Shamshiri of Commune Design shares her design insight on decorating in the new modern style. Check out her Japanese-inspired home to get more tips on modern decor.

Most Read

Pamela Shamshiri: That's a good way to describe it. We really limited the palette. Everything is very natural. All the materials are organic. The original owner back in 1931 was Japanese, and the house definitely feels very Japanese to me — the way it's built in a U shape around an inner courtyard.

The sliding doors make me think of shoji screens.

For those, we looked at a lot of Japanese references and chose to do them out of wood. The metal windows and doors were already here. Everything we added is salvaged and repurposed. In the living room, we used reclaimed redwood for the storage wall. I had gone to the salvage yard and I wasn't looking for redwood in particular, but I just loved that piece of wood, how it had aged. There were a lot of markings on it.

That sounds so wabi-sabi. House Beautiful did a famous issue about Japanese art and design back in 1960 that explored that whole concept.

We brought up 'wabi-sabi' all the time during the construction: 'This corner is very wabi-sabi. That piece of wood, yes, it's very wabi-sabi. Oh no, no, no, let's leave the wall like this.'

What does 'wabi-sabi' mean to you?

Embracing imperfection. And seeing the touch of the human hand. One thing we talked about early on was Japanese farmhouses and trying to have more of a rustic existence in the city. When you bring weathered wood into a room, it gives you more of that feeling. We talked about patina and how the house and the wood would age. All the materials are a bit worn. Each of the cement tiles on the floor is a little different. There was a moment of panic when they came in, but then we realized they were exactly what we wanted — handmade and unsealed, with no off-gassing epoxy finish. And all the walls are covered in clay.

Clay? Do you mean stucco?

No, it's actually a thin layer of clay plaster. And it does something amazing to the light. We were trying to achieve the kind of light you get with a Noguchi lantern. I read about American Clay products in the newspaper, and we did a test and loved the way it looked. The walls are luminous. I think the quality of sound in the house is really nice because of it, too.

There's not much furniture in the living room. It's as if you combined all the usual pieces into one huge sofa that looks like it could sleep six.

It could! And it's really comfortable because it's almost all down and it's covered in bedding material--an off-black duvet fabric done with vegetable dyes, so right off the roll it looks as if it has already faded a bit. You can kind of see the brown coming through.

It has the same long, low horizontal lines as the architecture.

That's why it works. There's so much glass in the room that you needed something to anchor it and create an island for hanging out in the middle. They used to have a sofa from their old house in there, with legs, but it couldn't hold its own. The room really needed something weighty and blocky.

What's the idea behind that floating shelf over the breakfast bar in the kitchen?

That's for dishes they use every day. They can grab them and serve the kids at that drop-down counter. Everything feels very functional in a Bauhaus way. Open shelves hold grains and things. Shallow cabinets, which I prefer because you don't have to dig, run above the counter. I'm not a big fan of upper cabinets at eye level. Ours are high, for more long-term storage. I've learned that the key is to give our clients proper storage. Otherwise, how can they maintain this life you've envisioned for them?

The way the pictures are hung on the dining room wall feels almost haphazard.

I love the word 'haphazard.' That's what we always go for at Commune, because we don't want places to feel so decorated that you lose the spontaneity and the folly of things.

Is the wood on one of the doors of that bedroom cabinet much lighter than the others?

It is. That piece is interesting because the body is so smooth and refined, and then it has these really rough, reclaimed doors. It's so wabi-sabi, and that's what we loved about it. The wood feels like it brings its history with it instead of covering it all up under plastic or paint. That cabinet has a soulfulness that you'd miss with something new and unused.

But some people can't bear to see a scratch.

A scratch is the evidence that there's a person nearby. I have a thing with all the polyurethane and sealants. It's great to remove them and just have things age naturally and get worn in the way they're meant to, and not prevent the process.

You've taken the sharp edge off modernism.

Modernism can be harsh and unnatural. Get pieces where you have the sense of the person who made it. That makes it more special. It will age well and live with you and become part of your collected life. You don't throw it out next year. And you're calm and relaxed, because everything feels right and nothing is too precious. I like that in spaces. It makes our clients feel like they can grow with their house and add to it. Everything is unfinished. The wood continues to age. The floor changes every day. There's something incomplete and yet complete about it.